How to Delete Unused WiFi Profiles in Windows 8.1

How to Delete WiFi Profile Data

Removing WiFi profile data in Windows 8.1 is quite different from the earlier versions. There is no one-click sort cut to do this. Removing the profiles completely from the computer involves two steps: 1. Using command prompt 2. Using registry editor.

Deleting the WiFi profile name using command prompt

1. Press Win key + X and open the command prompt as administrator in Windows 8.1. Now, enter the following syntax to view all the wireless network profile name.

netsh wlan show profiles

This command will show all the existing WiFi profile names in a list view.

2. You can now delete any profile name by using another command. Say, we want to delete the WiFi profile ‘home’. The syntax to delete this name from the system is

netsh wlan delete profile name="home"

Just replace the ‘home’ with your own from the above syntax. Once you run the above command, the system will notify you by confirming the deletion. You can repeat the earlier to check whether your desired WiFi profile has been deleted or not.

However, the above command does not delete the profile data completely from the system. There are still some data remaining in the registry of your computer. Here is how to remove the registry entries related to the unused WiFi profiles.

Deleting WiFi profile data from Windows Registry

1. Press the Win key + R combination from the keyboard, type ‘regedit’ in the run dialogue box and then click on OK.

2. In the registry editor, navigate to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles

3. In the left pane, you can see all the sub keys under the Profiles key related to the network connections, both for Ethernet and Wlan type.

4. Highlight every sub-key by clicking on it from the left pane and check the ProfileName at the right pane. If it matches with the name that you deleted earlier through command prompt, simply delete that sub-key by right-clicking on it from the left pane.

This deletes the WiFi profile data completely from your system.